Information Architecture

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Information Architecture

• Kathryn Summers
• 2006

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Web of information

• The world can be seen as only connections,
  nothing else A piece of information is really
  only defined by what its related to, and how
  its related. There really is little else to
  meaning.
• The structure is everything.
• Tim Berners-Lee
• Weaving the Web

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Definitions of IA

• Combination of organization, labeling, and
  navigation schemes within an information system
• Structural design of an info space to facilitate
  tasks and access to content
• Art/science of structuring and classifying
  websites to help people find and manage info
• Emerging discipline and community of practice
  bringing principles of design architecture to
  digital landscape
• Rosenfeld and Morville

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Definitions of user experience

• How the product behaves and is used in the real
  world how it feels to use it. (JJ Garrett)
• All aspects of the end-user's interaction with
  the company, its services, and its products.
  Meeting the users needs with simplicity and
  elegance making the product enjoyable to use.
  (paraphrase, NN/g)
• The sum total of a visitors website
  interactions and perceptions, influenced by
  visitor characteristics (knowledge, personality,
  demographics, etc.) and site characteristics
  (content, information architecture, visual
  design, performance, etc.). (Steve Fleckenstein)

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IA topics

• Organizational systems
• Labeling systems
• Navigational systems
• Search systems
• Thesauri, controlled vocabularies, metadata

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IA processes

• Research
• Research ? Decisions
• Testing (card sorting, user testing)
• Documentation

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Jesse James Garrett

• 5 levels of design
• Strategy (business and user goals, tech
  constraints)
• Scope (whats included, whats not)
• Structure (site maps, interaction design)
• Skeleton (wireframes, info design)
• Surface (visual design)

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Thom Haller

• Gather
• Evaluate
• Chunk
• Know
• Optimize

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Alex Wright

• Information architecture
• How to acquire knowledge in social groups
• How to get the right info to the right party at
  the right time
• How to distill meaning from raw data
• every complex organism on this planet is engaged
  in a shared struggle with information overload

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Alex Wrights caveat

• The practice of IA is primarily an institutional
  endeavor, driven by the needs of corporations,
  governments, and educational institutions
• IAs are heirs of yesterdays scribes, clerks,
  and clerics laboring to acquire, store, and
  disseminate knowledge for the sake of humanity,
  but ultimately in the service of institutions
• We need to look beyond the individual organism to
  the social groups that drive our information
  behavior

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Final Project

• Audience driven evolutionary changes to a
  PlainLanguage.gov website
• Government employees
• Academicians
• Press
• Critics
• Deliverables for Plain Language
• Heuristic analysis, content map, personas
• Navigation design (site map, nomenclature)
• Prototype pages (wireframes with minimal visual
  design, tested with users)

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Process Overview

• Strategy
• Scope
• Structure
• Skeleton
• Surface

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Systems Life Cycle Development
Ideal Traditional Project Life Cycle
Analysis/Design
Implement
Defect Removal
Rush to Code Project Life Cycle
Analysis/ Design
Implement
Defect Removal
Endless Requirements Project Life Cycle
Analysis/Design
Defect Removal
Implement
Joint Application Development Project Life Cycle
Analysis/ Design
Implement
Defect Removal
Analysis Strategy, Scope
Design Structure, Skeleton Surface
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What issues define strategy?

• Strategy Report
• Business priorities, needs and competitive
  analysis
• Business stakeholders and decision makers
• Target audience/User needs analysis
• Website analysis
• Business impact
• Management and maintenance
• Usage metrics
• Content Inventory
• Technical requirements
• Site objectives
• Audience member profiles

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Who to talk to

• Stakeholders
• Key decision-makers responsible for groups who
  will be affected by web strategy (use the
  interview as a two-way streetyou need buy-in)
• Users
• Attitudes, preferences (focus groups, surveys)
• Behaviors, actual choices (contextual inquiry,
  task analysis, cardsorting, usability testing)

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Brand strategy

• Brand positioningassociating a product or
  service with core values that resonate with
  people.
• Brand Promisethe primary benefit that
  differentiates your product or service from the
  competition. This is the benefit that you hope
  will motivate people to act.
• Brand attributesthe supporting benefits the
  customer receives from the product or service.
  Brand attributes may be functional or emotional.
  For example, they may help customers to feel a
  certain way about themselves.
• Brand personalityhow the brand is communicated
  to customers (through colors, image styles,
  typestyle, etc.)
• Customers are more likely to buy or use products
  that are strongly branded. That's because the
  decision to purchase is usually driven by
  emotions. Often the only thing separating a
  product from its competitors is its branding.

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Measuring success

• Increase in time per visit
• Increase in visits (repeat visits, or unique
  visits)
• Reduced support calls
• Conversion rate
• Reduced abandonment, increased revenues or
  donations

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Research Techniques

• Interviews/focus group meetings with decision
  makers, business strategy team, technology team
  and stakeholder groups
• Document reviews (business focused)

• Business Analysis
• Competitive Analysis
• Target Audience/User Analysis
• Website Analysis
• Business Integration Analysis
• Content Analysis
• Technical Analysis

• Heuristic evaluation (expert critique)
• Document/object gathering and definition (format,
  type, source, subject(s), audience, length,
  dynamism, language, etc.)
• Document/object metadata (structural, descriptive
  and administrative analysis
• Content mapping (source model types
  templates)
• Log/usage statistics analysis
• Search log analysis

• Benchmarking quantitative qualitative before
  and after

• Contextual inquiry (field study, ethnography,
  observation)
• Focus group and individual interviews (task and
  function requirements)
• Card sorting and affinity models
• Surveys (online, paper)
• User testing and think aloud protocols

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Answer

• Clear patterns emerge, outliers are distinctive
• Project
• Scope, boundaries, who needs to be involved,
  barriers to success, and opportunities that can
  be leveraged
• Context -
• Business goals, funding, politics, culture,
  technology and human resources
• Content -
• Documents/data types, content objects, metadata,
  volumes and existing structures
• Users -
• Audiences, tasks, needs, information seeking
  behavior, experience and vocabularies

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Research techniques a closer look

• Contextual inquiry
• Interviewing
• Task analysis
• User testing
• Card sorting
• When might these techniques be used?
• What can you do under pressure to move forward?

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Effective interviewing

• Dont lead, be neutral
• Get details (encouraging but neutral, followup
  questions, incomplete sentences, low-key
  redirection)
• Focus on behavior (use this page, not talk about
  this page)
• Record it

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Developing audience personas

• Builds upon demographics and primary audience
  data collection results
• Focuses needs by type of user
• Makes the audience real
• Forms basis for website usage scenarios day in
  the life of and task analysis

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User Goals and Tasks

• What are the users goals?
• What do they currently do to achieve these goals
  (tasks)?
• How do users relate tasks to goals?

Lynn answers incoming calls, coordinates
interviews and makes sure that files are
complete. She does data entry from the forms
potential employees (xxx is a staffing firm)
complete into the database.
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Work Environment

• What user characteristics might affect work?
• What is the users physical environment?
• What resources are available to users as they
  work?
• How do users interact with
• each other? With managers?
• With customers?

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Studying Work Flow

• Flow of work between people
• who initiates it
• who does what stage (roles)
• where does the work go (movement between
  locations)
• where do artifacts and final products go
• (Look for coordination, strategy, and informal
  structures that will need to be supported)

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Studying Specific Tasks

• What information do users need to do this task?
• Where does this info come from?
• What are the steps of the task (task sequence)?
• What is the result of the task?
• What do users do with the results?

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Task Flows
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User Profiles

• Digital photo
• Age
• First name
• Educational background
• Professional background

• Description of a typical day in the life
• People they collaborate with and how
• Domain knowledge
• Computer knowledge, web experience, connection
  speed
• Four or five key findings from interview
  regarding goals, needs, and what matters to them
  about their process

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Sample Profile

• John
• Member of IT Department xxx, ChicagoInterview
  Date February 23, 2001Facilitator Shelley
  Evenson, Michael Summers
•  
• Job Responsibilities
• Checks daily data backups, monitors servers, and
  has some helpdesk responsibilities.
• He does moves, adds, changes for the voice
  network he runs the dial-up application InterTel
  Axxess that makes changes to the PBX
•  
• Professional History
• Not Known

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John high-level scenario
Typical Day Johns (self-reported) day begins at
9am, and the first thing he does when he gets in
is check the server backups from the previous
night. Then he checks his e-mail and responds.
A break for coffee and food comes fairly early
in the morning, and then he checks voicemail.
Their IT department runs help desk software which
he checks for any issues, or trouble tickets. He
also spends time researching new products and
upcoming technologies, such as messaging. He
does some network planning with the IT director.

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Key Findings

• John complained at length about the clunky
  interface. It is a menu driven and command line
  interface that runs inside a window but looks
  more DOS-based. He runs the application on a
  dial-up connection from his desktop.
• John estimated that 25 of the time the names he
  gets from HR for new employees are spelled wrong.
  He enters the name in the Intertel Axxess system
  and then people who use the directory name lookup
  are not able to find the employee. John is the
  only one with access to correct the problem.
• When John assigns a phone the voice mail setup is
  a separate task, and he has to manually remember
  the extension hes just assigned to them. There
  is no screen indication of what it is.
• When John sets up a new person on the Intertel
  Axxess system he has to separately set up the
  trunk so they can receive outside calls.
• If John wants to move someone to a new location
  he has to completely erase their voicemail, which
  involves a lot of back and forth and checking
  with the employee so that they dont lose
  anything.
• It took John about a month to learn how to use
  Intertel Axxess and he went and took a training
  class with the manufacturer.

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A good persona is

• Specific (users need to be able to check out in 2
  minutes)
• Relevant (Users like beauty care samples and make
  purchase decisions based on samples)
• Universal (Some users already know what they want
  and need a quick way to find it and buy it)

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Scenarios

• Scenarios put personas into a narrative context
• Stories are concrete
• Stories are persuasive
• Stories are memorable
• Use them to guide design, to evaluate design, and
  to communicate with stakeholders, developers, etc.